Televising Restoration Spain: History and Fiction in Twenty-First-Century Costume Dramas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is a collection of essays on recent Spanish television series that are set in the period of the Spanish Restoration (1874-1931). Co-edited by Boston College Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Wan Sonya Tang and David R. George, Jr., this volume aims to add depth to the field of global media studies and reinvigorate 19th century Spanish literary and cultural studies by bringing the field into dialogue with contemporary theory on television, film, media, and visual culture. Essays cover topics such as the production of televisual heritage, evolving constructions of gender, and television as historian. Tang talked about the book in a video from BC Libraries.
Seeing the Spanish Restoration on TV
Exploring the natural philosophists
The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) is for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science. Edited by Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel McKaughan and Associate Professor of the Practice of Philosophy Holly VandeWall, The History and Philosophy of Science brings together seminal texts on astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences from antiquity to the end of the 19th century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of theories, The History and Philosophy of Science will enable readers to interpret and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science and understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings. The editors talked about the book in a video from BC Libraries.
A Montauk summer
In his new memoir, Boston College graduate John Glynn writes about a summer he spent living with friends at the beach on Long Island. Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer (Grand Central Publishing May, 2019) is a story of friendships, conflicts, secrets, and epiphanies that blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond. Out East has been named a Best Book of May by Entertainment Weekly and Time magazine. Glynn is an editor at Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from BC in 2008.
Book prize for Catherine Mooney
School of Theology and Ministry Associate Professor Catherine Mooney has been awarded the Hagiography Society Book Prize for her publication Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance (University of Pennsylvania Press). Founded in 1990, the Hagiography Society is an organization of scholars in various disciplines whose research involves the study of textual and visual media pertaining to holy men and women. The award citation reads in part: “Through extremely careful attention to philological, contextual, and documentary detail, Mooney is able to pull back the layers of hagiographic ideal that were imposed onto Clare’s official image and often served to erase the actual conditions in which Clare and other women like her lived. Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church, then, is a work of recovery, of restoring forms of women’s religious life in late medieval Italy; it is a model for how scholars of the premodern might seek out marginalized or suppressed presences in our canonical texts.” The prize will be awarded to Mooney this month at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. For more about Mooney’s book, read this 2017 BC Bookmarks post.
The witness of African American religious experience
Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis Books, 2018), a new book by Professor of Theology M. Shawn Copeland, “is a powerful reading of the Cross of Jesus, both as it is written in scripture and in the experience of the poor and oppressed—particularly in the history of black people in America, from the time of slavery up to the present,” according to the publisher. Copeland writes that discipleship calls the faithful to “act in solidarity with all those who suffer social oppression and to join them in the struggle for life and justice.” An award-winning theologian, Copeland also is the author of Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged African American history, Catholicism, Theology Department
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The Privately Printed Bible
The Privately Printed Bible: Private & Fine Press Editions of Biblical Texts in the British Isles and North America, 1892-2000 (Oak Knoll Press) by Boston College alumnus Ronald D. Patkus is the first book to offer a broad survey of the history of private and fine press printings of biblical texts. Patkus focuses on English-language examples from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and North America, and includes more than 500 works in his study and more than 100 illustrations that demonstrate the aesthetics of layout, design, and illustration taken up by various presses. The book is divided into chapters that each deal with a specific generation of printers: the Revival, the “Second Generation,” the Postwar Era, and the late 20th century. In his book, Patkus describes key texts, such as the Doves Bible, the Oxford Lectern Bible, the Golden Cockerel Four Gospels, the Spiral Press Ecclesiastes, the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, and the Arion Press Bible. Patkus received a BA and PhD from from Boston College. He holds the Frederick Weyerhaeuser Endowed Chair in Biblical Literature and Bibliography at Vassar College where he serves as associate director of the libraries for special collections and is a member of the History Department. He previously was head of archives at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College. His volume was reviewed recently by Burns Library Conservator Barbara Adams Hebard for the Guild of Book Workers Newsletter.
Workplace blues
The American workplace has eroded across many dimensions, leaving workers feeling untethered and insecure about their futures, according to a new book by Lynch School of Education and Human Development Professor of Counseling Psychology David Blustein, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the psychology of work. The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty: The Eroding Work Experience in America (Oxford University Press, June 2019) details Blustein’s new research that finds American workers increasingly beset by anxiety and distress wrought by economic trends that have reshaped when, where, how, and how long Americans work to earn both a living and a sense of purpose. Blustein hopes his findings will add a needed psychological perspective to debates and policies about work that thus far have been mainly limited to economic and political considerations. Read more from Boston College Chronicle.
The old neighborhood
In his new book, Professor of English Carlo Rotella mixes journalism and memoir to write about his hometown, Chicago, and about the greater question of what defines a neighborhood. Rotella interviewed current and former residents of the neighborhood where he grew up, Chicago’s South Shore. As detailed in The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (University of Chicago Press, May 2019) South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped over the past 50 years by issues of race, class, crime, and other influences. As the middle class disappeared, South Shore became a place of the haves and have-nots, making it difficult for residents to recognize each other as neighbors. A microcosm for the American urban neighborhood, Chicago’s South Shore challenges one to think about how neighbors can build bridges and take down walls in order to create a vibrant community.Rotella, who teaches in BC’s American Studies program, is also the author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights and Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt, among other titles. Read an interview with Rotella in the Chicago Tribune.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Chicago, city life, English Department, urban life
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Blessed are the Peacemakers
In her new book Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding (Fortress Press, 2019), Monan Professor of Theology Lisa Sowle Cahill offers a historical understanding of pacifism and just war theory, while advocating a newer approach to conflict situations called peacebuilding. According to Cahill, peacebuilding seeks to transform conditions of violence and bring about a just and sustainable peace. It is particularly needed in the 21st century as evidence grows that other approaches have failed to achieve sustainable peace. She writes: “Peacebuilders agree on the preeminent importance of taking non-violent yet forceful measures to deter ongoing violence, undo social injustice, and bring opposed groups together around a negotiated vision of social coexistence and cooperation.”
When is free trade not free?
In his new book Consent and Trade: Trading Freely in a Global Market (Cambridge University Press, 2019), BC Law School Professor Frank Garcia offers an examination of trade law’s roots in consensual exchange, highlighting the central role of consent in differentiating trade from legally facilitated coercion, exploitation or predation. Garcia contends the U.S. needs to re-capture a vision of trade as mutually beneficial consensual exchange, and negotiate agreements that protect and enhance consent, rather than undermine it. By recovering the idea of consent in trade law, in a global marketplace, the U.S. and its trade partners can flourish. Recently, BC’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy gathered a group of international scholars for a roundtable discussion of the ideas put forth by Garcia in his book. Read more in Boston College Law School Magazine.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston College Law School, international trade
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